Authored by Professor Nigel Balmer, Professor Catrina Denvir, Dr Hugh McDonald, and Professor Emily S. Taylor Poppe, this study uses experiments with features of civil legal problems that might shape whether people see them as legal matters and whether they would seek legal help.

The findings confirm that legal characterisation is not purely subjective but is systematically shaped by dispute features, and that it remains strongly associated with the decision to use a lawyer. As Nigel Balmer writes in an accompanying blog post, the results reinforce the case for designing legal services that respond to how people actually perceive their problems, not how a system assumes they should.

Read the article. Published in the Journal of Law and Society, 2026, 53, 3-26.